How to Fix iTunes

Several people were interested in this, so I figured a new post was better than replying in several places.

I believe what I did was this:

1) Click on the little dark/light rectangle in the top left — the one with a down arrow next to it, that does nothing to tell you what it’s for. (Design failure #1: I’m clicking semi-randomly on things to find out what they are.)

2) In that menu, tell it to show me the menu bar.

3) Now I have a “File/Edit/View/etc” bar. Thank god. But there’s something else I have to do before that can become useful.

4) Click over to Songs in that top ribbon — not the menu bar I just brought in.

5) This allows me to deal with the “Column Browser” sub-menu under “View,” which was inactive when I was still on the default Artist tab. I think it defaulted to showing me the column browser (which is what I wanted), but if not, you can turn it on here.

6) Now you have your genres/artists/albums listings up above, with the songs below, like it used to be (at least for me). But where the hell are my playlists and such, that used to be on the left???

7) Again under “View,” click “Show Sidebar.”

8) If you want, you can also click “Show Status Bar,” which gives you back the bottom edge of the window, where it lists stats.

That got me back all the navigational tools I was accustomed to using. I basically will never click on that top ribbon again, the one with “Songs/Artists/Albums/etc,” as any tab other than “Songs” is Ye Newe Terrible View.

Also, the “shuffle” button now operates more like on an iPod: it’s up by the top of a playlist name, and you click on it to start the music playing in a shuffled fashion. If, once it’s started, you want to turn off shuffling, that’s in the window where it shows time, etc.

Hopefully that’s useful to people.

0 Responses to “How to Fix iTunes”

  1. hawkwing_lb

    This is extremely useful. I’d about given up getting any useful functionality back in the New ‘Tunes, and defaulted to grinding my teeth at its touchscreen-friendly setup.

    Dear Apple: some of us still use a mouse or trackerpad, and like it that way.

  2. beccastareyes

    The Windows version* hides the menu bar? Wow, Apple.

    * Assuming here, since Macs put the menu bar at the top of the monitor, and have it shift to whatever application is on top. So I can see the menus just by clicking on the iTunes window, even if it’s minimized.

    Though right now, my iTunes design annoyance is that the ”collapse to icon in the taskbar’ button used to be the one I used to make it the tiny ‘only show the song and basic controls’ window.

  3. gwyneira

    Thank you! I had figured out that just leaving it on the Songs view was best, but not how to make it show me the sidebar and status bar. Someone needs to tell them that “intuitive design” needs to be actually *intuitive*, not obfuscatory.

    • Marie Brennan

      I really don’t get why “take away your navigational options” sounded like a good idea to them.

      • alecaustin

        Many UI designers have the delusion that simplicity = elegance = good to an irrational degree. Live in that bubble long enough, and hiding “advanced” controls from users starts to sound like a good idea.

        • Marie Brennan

          And then you run into the problem that users want a program to do everything they might think to use it for, but also not to be complicated. Which, um. (But that’s not what I’m asking for here.)

  4. melissima

    Oh my gawd Thank You. I had figured out enough to play iTunes Radio again, which resulted in my not giving up the software altogether, but this made everything better. Again, thank you.

Comments are closed.